Unless you’re a four-year-old Skittles scoffer or a bored middle-aged Wii fitter, it’s fair to say that the Kinect has yet to really set the gaming world alight.
For every Child of Eden or Dance Central, there’s a family-friendly (read: predominately pants) Kinect Adventures or Fantastic Pets.
So SEGA’s foray into the world of the Kinect’s first horror game definitely peaked our interest. We like good horror. We like waving our arms about and screaming. And we certainly loved SEGA’s House of the Dead franchise back in the day.
Alas, Rise of the Nightmares is about as scary, tactile, responsive and enjoyable as your average budget funfair ghost ride – full of naff visuals, predictable shocks and guaranteed to leave you feeling shortchanged. Still, it’s not all bad – if nothing else, it’s the first game since Child of Eden to convincingly and blatantly attempt to ruffle the feathers of the system’s already staid set-up.
The story is about as involving and engaging as the zombie-blasting games of old. Whilst zipping through the predictably Gothic looking Eastern European countryside, your missus is wife-napped by a mad scientist, and you set off to find her.
Stepping in front of you moves you forward, while walking backwards moves you back (shocking, that), turning left and right is handled by a rotation of the shoulders, and a pointed lunge forward makes you move quicker. It all works fine in principle, and the ‘wandering along a train’ tutorial is enjoyably kitsch.
Unless you’re Siderodromophobic, it’s unlikely that a game titled Rise of the Nightmares is going to be concerned primarily with train-walking levels. So before too long, on your mission to save said wandering wife, you’re confronted with all manner of undead chompers – which is where both the controls and any sense of enjoyable consistency goes out the window.
When the blood starts to fly, so do your arms and legs. And while that’s an impressive level of engagement to aim towards, the reality is far more infuriating with sensitive controls picking up every minute movement and guaranteed to leave you either having your face munched off or repeatedly headbutting the wall.
The default cop-out mode allows you to progress through sections by limply raising your right hand into the air, and while that works, it also reduces the game to little more than the on-rails House of the Dead games of old. Which, again, was undeniably enjoyable once upon a time. Back in 1997. On the Saturn.
If you can get past the irritating set-up, the action portion is brainlessly brilliant fun. Whacking zombies with an energetic flailing of the arms is enthusiastically infectious, while the array of weapons you have to dismember them with (machetes, chainsaws et al) are suitably visceral. And like all good FPS-ers, you can affect your melee attack by actually kicking out ahead of you (best to stand back from the telly for that one).
It’s certainly a noble experiment, but one that’s ultimately unnervingly shocking and nightmarish for all the wrong reasons – and whether that’s due to its premature release in the Kinect’s relatively foetus-like technological development cycle, or due to a host of lazy, stunted developers is something that only time will tell.
[Rating:2.5/5]
Rise of the Nightmares is on General Release now, and available on Xbox 360 Kinect.
